


Dancing

by lferion



Category: Dancing with the Stars (US), Highlander: The Series
Genre: Competency, Competition, Dancing, Gen, Immortals, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 16:21:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8899126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/pseuds/lferion
Summary: Dancing with stars





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pat_t](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pat_t/gifts).



> Many thanks to the usual suspects, especially Amandr, for patience above and beyond.

If asked, Methos might well have said he could one day see himself dancing among the stars, as in with humanity spreading up and out beyond this one small planet circling one small sun. He might even have thought, in the headlong race to reach the moon the first time, that the first decades of the twenty-first century would see ships and stations and colonies making that happen. 

He would not at all have expected to be involved with literal dancing (waltzes and tangos and modern, up to the minute forms with names that refused to stick) with stars of a very different order. Entertainment figures, luminaries of politics and science and literature, people apparently famous simply because they believed they were famous. Even if one or two of them had been astronauts, or had enough money to pay for a seat on the first commercial shuttle, whenever that might fly. Human stars, not celestial.

Of course, he was not actually dancing. No, Methos — Bredon W. Peters on his California drivers license, a revolving set of handles on an assortment of social media platforms, Don to his friends — was one of the production crew, behind the lights and cameras and glitter. Duncan and Amanda were the dancers. Professional, decorative, making their partners look good, feel good, shine on the dance floor and before the cameras.

* * *

Sometimes fighting was like dancing. Sometimes dancing was like fighting. Sometimes they were the same thing. Footwork, balance, spatial awareness, rhythm, tempo, acute awareness of bodies and cues and whatever tools there were to hand. A sword is an extension of the arm, the will, the desire to live, contesting gravity, entropy, agony, despair.

Oh, Duncan, thought Methos, quick on his feet, the steel in his hands vibrating with energy, this isn't a _fight,_ this is a dance, foreplay, ritual. Not that either of them could, should or would be careless, and not that it wasn't serious, just … not fatal, permanently or otherwise. Except possibly the time-honored petit-mort. That was a mort he would gladly suffer. Would delight in making Duncan suffer. Either way, this wasn't a fight he would exactly _lose_ , whatever the outcome of their spar.

* * *

Sometimes dancing was like fighting, with floor and walls and other dancers obstacles to one's aim, which might be dervish-like whirling or slow work or finding the pivot point between spinner and spun, the balance between lifter and lifted, leader and led, restless form and scattered mind, with flailing will trying to impose a discipline on all the disparate parts. Fighting for grace, for form, for harmony with music and partner and everything else. Sometimes the choreography fought back, and Methos could hear Terpsichore's mocking laughter from eons past. 

 

And sometimes, just sometimes, dancing and fighting were the same thing, working toward the same aim. To win. The Prize, the partner, the pot of gold, the adulation of the audience, wresting attention and energy and everything else toward reaching the end, alive, upright, unbroken, undefeated by unruly flesh or slippery floor, tricky beats or pinching shoes, taking the bow at the end, the bouquet, the heady ecstatic energy of _winning_. And all the machinery of production went forth, a dance of its own, lights and sound and costume and makeup, mechanicals and talent, musicians and coaches and the people making tea. All a dance, greater and lesser luminaries, but the firmament was not complete without each and every one of them.

* * *

Seeing Duncan hand his partner up to the platform, trim and elegant in classically cut tail-coat, a perfect foil for her deceptively simple bias-draped gown, poised, happy, keyed up and confident, ready to dance her heart out, knowing Duncan would be there at every lift, every turn, with her, not against, every bit as committed to laying it all out on the floor, last chance, last dance, only the finale to come, Methos knew this was a moment, a span of time he would remember. Not just for the pleasure of seeing Duncan dance, of being part of the production that made it all happen, but also because of the sheer audacity of it all. Immortals on television, dancing with the stars.

Here they were, in the finals. Terpsichore and her sisters in the heavens would be proud.


End file.
